Venice, Venice.
We love it even when it drives us mad. We goggle at the city and lagoon as
they throw back their shimmering mirage-images to trick and tease us on the
film festival-hosting Lido. And we adore the
festival itself even when – to put it bluntly – we can’t find it.

This year’s theme, unofficially at least, was ‘Ariadne
and the Minotaur.’ How do you find your way to the heart of a maze on the
ancient shores of the Med?Our advice:
take a ball of thread and some anti-monster spray. The bosky woods on the Lido, where movie bars and
meeting-points had grown up near the main cinemas, and where for years we
critics have loved and sung and danced, have now been razed for a building
site the size of Nanking.
It is that of the new Palazzo del Cinema, due in 2011.

Nothing is any longer recognizable. The poet Dante would write today:
“In the middle of my life/ I found myself in what used to be a dark forest/
But it is now a glaring hardhat site/ Where even the open-air cafes have
disappeared.”

Yet with fantastic heroism we critics – lost but not defeated –
prevailed. We cut through alleys, down secret cellar steps, across
underground lakes, into and out of Middle Earth, up marble stairways and
finally found it. The festival. It was just around the corner.

And behold, it was good. And behold, it kicked off with two films that
foretold the end of the world in contrasting and compelling ways. One was
John Hillcoat’s THE ROAD, which with
ashen-apocalyptic images faithfully retells the Cormac
McCarthy novel about a dad and boy journeying across a post-cataclysm America. Faithfully, that is, apart from CharlizeTheron popping up as hero Viggo
Mortensen’s flashbacked wife. (Even this succeeds, not least for the spooky
resemblance between Theron and KodiSmitMcPhee, the Australian
actor playing the son)..The film is halfway between Tarkovsky and MAD MAX. But so was the book. So like we
said, faithful and true.

The other end-of-world movie was the star event of the festival’s
first week. Let’s hear it again for Michael Moore, now a fixture on the world
festival chart. CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY was his bid to add a Venice Golden Lion to his Cannes Golden Palm for FAHRENHEIT 9/11. The new documentary is a two-hour
raspberry blown at free-market economics and apparently a film Moore had set up before the banking meltdown.

So the heavens ring with “I told you so”, and with the sound of angels
laughing while white-collar mortals sob. When was a math class this
enjoyable? Moore begins with scenes from ancient Rome, cuts to WashingtonDC (same architectural style) and then traverses the fiscal-historical
landscape, from early Reaganomics to George W Bush’s policy of throwing the
nation’s money down a hole the size of the earth’s
core.

No one escapes whipping: not Wal-Mart and Co (creaming life-insurance
payouts from dead employees), not private-enterprise juvenile prisons (with
payola for sentence-happy judges). Obama comes
closest to a papal indulgence. But even he had Goldman Sachs for a main
campaign funder: a company whose building Moore ends by ringing with yellow crime-scene tape, a happy addition to his
repertoire of ways to besiege and bother the lairs of fat cats.

The film is heady entertainment, if not always head-down thought or
hard-argued exegesis. To attack the abuses of a system is not to convict the
system itself. And just when we think Moore is happy, given his own supposed political convictions, to hand the
reigns of economic control to the state, he changes his mind and tries
snatching them back. Witness the security van he drives around Wall Street
near the close, backing it up to the front portals of successive banks in a
bid to reclaim the ‘bailout’ money rashly (in his view) invested by
Washington.

But who expects Moore
to be consistent? We grant this Gadfly Laureate the freedom to say
occasionally, with Walt Whitman, “I contradict myself? Very well, I
contradict myself.”

The very fact that Moore has been let into the magic circle of the film festival competitionworldsuggestssome kind of reclassification. Commentator? Documentarist?
No, the world now views him, partly at least,as an artist: someone who makes
things up, who Whitmanesquely “contains
multitudes”; someone like – if you want two other examples from weirdo America who freakdanced through Venice – Todd Solondz and Steven Soderbergh.

Solondz brought LIFE DURING WARTIME, a semi-surreal sequel to HAPPINESSthatsoundedas if it might be a disaster. We expected another doodle-movie like
Solondz’s STORYTELLING or PALINDROMES, another barely-inflated footnote to a
career that has lost the knack of thinking in long paragraphs.

The new film is short (90 minutes), but it cuts to the bone. It slices
not just the fat from its own script, presenting a series of brutal, funny
sketches featuring living simulacra of the original actors. (Shirley
Henderson has the same rinky-dink head-cold voice as Jane Adams. Ally Sheedy might be Lara Flynn Boyle’s doppelganger). It also cuts straight to the quick of the
characters themselves, frequently using the ‘innocent’ perspicacity of
children to turn the stiletto. The young son of Allison Janney
(who plays Cynthia Stevenson’s role from HAPPINESS) catechises his mother,
right there in the kitchen, about her latest sex fantasies. Near the film’s
end, Ciaran Hinds, as the jail-released version of
Dylan Baker’s child molester, has his soul scalpelled
open – with alarming economy – by his own son, now a haunted, dorky but
all-perceiving college student.

Gales of nervous laughter greeted Solondz’s film. The laughs were less
nervous, but still wary, during Soderbergh’s THE INFORMANT!True story: Mark Whitacre
(played by Matt Damon) did blow the whistle on his agri-industrial
company’s bosses for price-fixing, then went to jail for even longer than
they after being exposed as an embezzler and pathological liar.

A comedy? It could only be one, perhaps, in the hungover
haze of the world’s recent and ongoing bankruptcy binge. We have had enough
raving and reproaching, Soderbergh probably thought. Let’s have a few sober
chuckles to steady the financial universe, as it keeps revolving around us
like a drunkard’s bedroom ceiling.

Soderbergh favours classy beige colours,
sleek and tailored, as if competing for best-dressed banking satire. Matt
Damon dons a curly brown wig and moustache and has the time of his life,
pushing bright-eyed ingenuousness and geniality at us like
a combination of Ed Wood (Johnny Depp version) and
his own talented Mr Ripley. The final ingredient that makes the movie hum, or makes us come out humming it, is Marvin Hamlisch’s music. An odd composing choice, Hamlisch produces just the right kitsch swing, tootling and tuneful if twenty-stories high with irony.

Beneath the tall buildings of any festival of course – those films
that soar towards high art or high entertainment – there are the seven layers
of Troy. These are the levels that form the ‘hidden city,’ the dormant themes
and synergies, that make up a movie junket’s character, and make that
character different from the one on parade in other years.

In 2009 the top layer of Troy-on-the-Adriatic was films by, for or
about women. How they massed! How they multiplied! They came from Egypt: YousryNasrallah’s
SCHEHEREZADE, TELL ME A STORY, a fictive female TV interviewer’s exposure of
Arab patriarchalism in three human stories told on
her programme, the last being her own as a wealthy husband’s battered wife.
They came from Tunisia, with Raja Amari’s BURIED
DREAMS (three woman servants hold a rich girl hostage in a villa), from Iran
with WOMEN WITHOUT MEN, a gender-persecution fable from the video artist
turned filmmaker ShirinNazat,
and from Romania, with Bobby Paunescu’s FRANCESCA,
whose heroine wants to emigrate to Italy for work but is bombarded with
horror stories about anti-Romanian racism. FRANCESCA caught a lawsuit from
Alessandra Mussolini, no less (granddaughter of Il Duce),
alleged by the movie to be carrying on the family tradition of xenophobic
nationalism. “Slut” is one of the kinder names she gets called on screen.

There was even a serving of feminist cinema from dear old Britain, albeit directed by a German, Sherry Hormann,
and centring on a Somalian. DESERT FLOWER is the
story of the African-born supermodel WarisDirie, who parlayed her catwalk fame into a parallel
career as campaigner against female circumcision. This is the barbaric
practise, popular in tribal Africa, whereby a
girl is robbed of her capacity for sexual pleasure by a tradition invented by
men for their misogynistic/male-supremacist gratification.

Ideally, the theme needed a stronger film than this. The author’s
message –or rather the heroine’s, declaimed here in
a word-for-word speech Dirie gave to the United
Nations – comes late in the day, after an hour of fun and games in
post-swinging London.
Juliet Stevenson as a campy publicist; Timothy Spall
as a bumbling fashion photographer; Sally HAPPY-GO-LUCKY Hawkins as a chirpy
roommate. (What is this, the Mike Leigh Reunion Society?) But maybe a
gruesome subject needed a cheerful film to lead the way. Then we can get the
heavy mob in, from docu-cinema, to take the topic
over.

A film about female causes has to be more than a feminist broadside.
(DESERT FLOWER’s main problem is that it is less
than a feminist broadside). Claire Denis’s WHITE MATERIAL stars Isabelle
Huppert in an African-set story, prickly, combative, small-P-political, that
could have been stolen from the back of a drawer in JM Coetzee’s
writing desk.

Except that Denis is an avant-gardiste. She
moves social conflict and human dilemma into a realm bordering on the
abstract, even balletic. (See closing scene of BEAU
TRAVAIL). Huppert’s coffee grower, holding down a civil-war-threatened farm
in an unnamed ex-colony, becomes a Mother Courage as this oblique, oneiric movie unspools,
supported by a troupe of non-helpmeets including Christophe
Lambert (weaselly ex-husband). Michel Subor (dying father-in-law) and Nicolas Duvauchelle, playing her tattooed slacker son, who takes
up bizarre cause with the rebels. The film is weird, electrifying,
unresolved, unforgettable – like a tale sketched in
lightning strokes as a thunderstorm gathers over a continent.

Male cinema at Venice
– filmsby,foror about men – was out-thought, outflanked and out-performed. Men,
when they did occupy centre screen, were wimps (LIFE DURING WARTME),
scoundrels (THE INFORMANT!), members of the doomed (THE ROAD) or even gay
literature professors vaguely modelled on Christopher Isherwood
(Colin Firth in Tom Ford’s A SINGLE MAN, an etiolatedfilm that does little honour to Isherwood’s irony and humane unsentimentality).

The almost sole exception to milquetoast male movies was Samuel Maoz’sLEBANON. This is a blast of pride, rage and tragedy from Israel, a film about
war that makes INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS – to take the summer’s box-office high
flyer among war pics – seem like the writing on the
kindergarten wall that it is, scribbled by dyslexics for dysfunctionals.

Written and directed by a veteran of the 1982 Lebanon war, Maoz’s film is a tour de force. Set inside a tank during battle engagements that
escalate from the minor (skirmish in a banana grove) to the momentous
(entrapped confrontation with guerrillas in a mazy city abandoned by
comrades), its exercise in claustrophobia may have
you hammering at the air above your head as if it were the tank’s hatch-door.
Maoz makes a virtue – no, a marvel – of this
confinement. We start to understand how men can go mad in war (or this kind
of war); how minds can warp, how chains of command can melt in the heat, how
the hallucinatory can take over from the visible and actual, especially when
the tank’s visitors book is successively signed – or would be if it had one –
by a dead body (dumped for temporary storage), a scared Syrian prisoner, and
his Christian Phalangist escort, an ‘ally’ who promises to lead the tank to
safety but seems to have the word ‘traitor’ sewn in sweat on his
forehead.

As with all good film festivals, you never knew what was coming next.
One day the Venezuelan waiter at my favourite café on the GranViale – ‘La Cina’ – said,
“Hugo Chavez is here.” What? The President of Venezuela? Popping into the festival for a day?

It was true. Chico the waiter, who knew Chavez’s chief bodyguard,
later showed me the photos of the reception. The reason for the neo-Marxist
head of state’s visit was the premiere of SOUTH OF THE BORDER, a documentary
about him by Oliver Stone, the one filmmaker who probably can move world leaders across oceans.
I was unable to see the documentary, unfortunately, due to the Kennedy
dispensation’s embargo on interaction with Latin American communist
dictatorships. However, I enjoyed the later festival-mag
photos of Stone, soon to make WALL STREET 2, sitting next to Michael Moore at
a dinner, two filmmakers who have earned money by knocking capitalism.

Well, who doesn’t like a bit of controversy? While Italian newspapers
daily shipped news to the Lido of the latest Berlusconi nymphet scandals;
while my Catholic worker-priest film-critic friend continued to refuse me the
alms he once promised me in Cannes when I stood penniless and hungry outside
a restaurant; and while Marco Muller, Mostra boss,
tried to placate queuers incensed by a mid-festival
flurry of hour-long delays to film starts; while all this went on, our
appetites were sharpened not blunted by lively adversity. We repeat: we never
know what Venice
will come up with next.

The competition’s third day, for instance, went almost straight into
the history books. Call it Freaky Friday. It was bizarre enough that we should
wake up to one Werner Herzog cop
thriller: four words nobody ever expected to see joined in sequence.
(Screened first thing in the morning, the starter-kit shoot-em-up from the Bavarian ex-mystic was BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW
ORLEANS.)
Come the evening, though, when the wraps were taken off the day’s hitherto
unnamed and eagerly awaited film sorpresa (surprise film) – which could have been any
attention-worthy movie from any director in the world – guess what. It was another Herzog crime romp. Also set in
America, MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? marked
not only a double whammy of incongruous twinnings
between a German art helmer and the world of Hollywoodpotboiling. It was also the first time at any Venice Film Festival that two films by one director had competed for the
Golden Lion.

What’s a Lion without a Cage (we asked rhetorically)? And lo! Nicolas
of that name was the star of the first film, Herzog’s tribute to Abel
Ferrara’s original thriller about a vocation-abusing cop, Ferrara having welcomed
news of the film with “I hope they rot in hell” (‘they’ meaning Herzog and
the title-owning producer of both BAD LIEUTENANTS, Edward Pressman). Cage
proves to be the main or only reason to watch the flick. Playing a
post-Katrina police detective easing his traumas with drugs from the police
pound, the actor hasn’t gone this wild and spacey since LEAVING LAS VEGAS. His fits of dilated eye-work and baroque delirium tremens, his moments of poetic flakiness alternating
with scenery-chewing tantrums, above all his ability to give a simple line a
visionary lift and heft – “What are those fucking iguanas doing on my table?”
(a moment of stoned hallucination in the cop shop) – confirm that Cage is
still Cage, or can be, even though a dozen dead-eyed blockbusters over the
last two decades have made us doubt it.

The second consignment of Herzog hokum was more Herzogian:
lots of seriocomic surrealism (mainly involving flamingos) and several
flashbacks to Peru, where the murder-suspected protagonist Michael Shannon,
besieged in the present by cops outside the suburban US home where he has
slain his mum (the fabulous Grace Zabriskie, on
loan from exec-producer David Lynch’s repertory
troupe), had had a formative ‘bad trip’.

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? is based
on a true story, but you wouldn’t know it. (Come to think of, I’m based on a
true story). We just shrug, happily or otherwise, at the film’s
transcendental loopiness, while also tittering
nostalgically at Herzogisms that recall happier
times. There is a lovely little digression – a non-sequitur worthy of
STROSZEK – involving a dwarf, a miniature horse and a giant chicken. Don’t
ask any more. Just rent the DVD.

The only person who could outshine, for charisma and legend-incising
kookiness, a Herzog double bill – let alone a Herzog-Ferrara verbal punchup (to which the Bavarian cleverly contributed by
saying he had never heard of Abel Ferrara) – was and is George Clooney.

Gorgeous George always comes to Venice. He regards this home of architectural suavity as his fiefdom. He
also has the talent to distract us from a lousy film if he has made one. (THE
MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS is a comic stinker about military Psi
Ops). George does this with shtick at the press conference. On the present
occasion a man in the audience rose, stripped to his underpants and
proclaimed, “Take me, George, I’m yours!” Clooney dressed him down with a
look and said something well-timed to the effect that he would let him know,
adding a buffo aside for the
audience about the imminent arrival of men in white coats. It was not great
wit but it was great vaudeville.

Yes, we at Venice
have always depended on the kindness of strangers. They are mostly called
filmmakers, though on the last day they are called jurors. Will they – we
ask, we wonder, we silently implore – favour the film we ourselves have
praised in print? Will they lionise what we have lauded? Or will they, ingloriosibastardi, present the Leone d’Oro to something we haven’t seen? Either because we
were held up by moments of state (H. Chavez) or because we were unavoidably
detained by an ice cream on the GranViale.

This year’s president was the great Ang Lee,
so there was hope. In early stages of the prize ceremony
that hope looked endangered. Performance awards went to Britain’s
Colin Firth, for mixing a little sensitivity with a lot of stiff upper lip in
the gay love drama A SINGLE MAN (directed by Tom Ford from Christopher Isherwood’s novel),and to Russia’s
KseniaRappoport for
running about like a mad thing as the immigrant heroine of the Italian murder
thriller LA DOPPIA (THE DOUBLE HOUR).

It was good to see Best Screenplay awarded to Todd Solondz for LIFE
DURING WARTIME, less good to see Best Director squandered on Iranian
video-artist-turned-helmerShirinNazat, whose WOMEN WITHOUT MEN was eye-catching
without being heart-or-mind-seizing.The Special Jury Prize went to FatihAkin’s SOUL KITCHEN, which divided critics clean down the
middle: not a pleasant experience when the middles – their stomachs and
gustatory appetites – are the parts wooed by this restaurant comedy from the
Turkish-German director of HEAD-ON.Some liked the tale of ethnic misadventure and social non-cohesion
among Hamburg’s Greek community.Others
thought it resembled middling Mike Leigh gone Garstarbeiter.

Then came the moment.The 2009
Golden Lion is awarded to –

LEBANON!

Cheers, riots, ovation. The best film had won Best Film.After that everything was okay.We passed out into the night drinking
champagne – some just passed out – and Venice seemed again the magical place it is.

Please reserve my pensione in this
Adriatic paradise for 2010.Please dry-dock my gondola.In the famous words of a recent giant of European cultural history:
“I’ll be back.”

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.